ABS figures reveal the failure to match collection rate of previous online Census nights

THE reputation of the ABS has been dealt another blow, with the Census website unavailable yet once more this morning. Here we go again.

Census 2016 program manager Duncan Young says half of Australian households have submitted their census. Picture: Supplied

CENSUS woes are continuing on Friday morning with the website experiencing yet another outage.

Upon trying to log on to the ABS website, Australians were told the site was “unreachable” due to experiencing another “servor error”.

Frustrated Australians vented their frustration over Twitter ...

#OMG spoke to a human at #census. "System is experiencing an outage". Paper form requests can't be processed. Told to call back #CensusFail

— Vicki Kerrigan (@VickiKerrigan) August 18, 2016

The government agency collecting the nation’s statistics doesn’t know or won’t say exactly how many census forms have been completed since a website it took down went back online a week ago.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics says more than half of Australian households have now filled out the survey, but won’t reveal how many forms have been completed online.

About 2.3 million forms were submitted on census night before the census website was shut down after a series of cyber attacks. There are concerns some Australians are prepared to risk $180 per day fines and boycott or mislead the census amid privacy concerns.

When Australia launched its first online Census in 2006 after a three-year long extensive testing program that included two major trials and a “dress rehearsal”, two thirds of the Australians who submitted their Census through the website had done so by the end of Census night.

There was another spike in submissions the following day in 2006, so that more than 80 per cent of Australians who submitted their Census through the website that year had done so within 24 hours of Census day.

The ABS has not released comparative data for the 2011 online census.

The 2006 rate of submission is a stark contrast to the 2016 online Census, which has been plagued by the failure of the IBM-built Census server that the ABS turned off under the threat of a denial of service attack after the bureau had collected 2.3 million online forms.

CENSUS 2016 SERVERS CONTINUE TO FAIL

ONLY HALF OF HOUSEHOLDS COMPLETE CENSUS 2016

STUDENTS DESIGN BETTER CENSUS SERVER THAN IBM

ABS Census Program head Duncan Young said “more than half of Australian households” had submitted their forms a week after census night. In 2006, the online Census collection reached that figure sometime on the evening of Census night.

Mr Young has not released a breakdown of how many of the five million forms collected so far have been online submissions or printed forms.

Former ABS chief Bill McLennan has warned that there would be “severe doubts” about the validity of the Census information if just 10 per cent of Australians failed to submit their forms.

The ABS continues to urge Australians to complete their Census. It has 38,000 field officers knocking on doors, able to either provide a census paper or a 12-digit login code for those still wanting to lodge their form online.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census of Population and Housing badly misfiring website is seen on a computer in Sydney. Picture: AAP / Joel Carrett

IBM have failed to respond to written questions repeatedly submitted by News Corp Australia since the system failure on census night.

While today it again did no answer specific questions, it issued a statement: “The Federal Government has indicated that there will be a review undertaken by Alastair MacGibbon,” an IBM spokesman said.

“We fully appreciate the interest surrounding this important project. To ensure we are supporting the integrity of the review process, it would be premature to comment at this stage.

“I can say IBM’s priority continues to be working with our client and stakeholders to ensure that the online Census remains operational and secure.”

An error message is seen on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census of Population and Housing website. Picture: AAP / Joel Carrett

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